WASHINGTON — Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has signed H.5595, deceptively titled the “Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act,” eliminating the state’s remaining statutory limits on abortions performed after 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Previously, Massachusetts law permitted abortions after 24 weeks only when necessary to preserve the life or physical or mental health of the mother, or in cases involving a lethal or severe fetal diagnosis. The new law replaces those statutory conditions with the “professional judgment” of the physician performing the abortion—effectively allowing abortion for any reason throughout pregnancy, including when both mother and unborn child are healthy.

The legislation also eliminates the requirement that abortions after 24 weeks be performed in a hospital, removing an important safeguard for women undergoing dangerous late-term procedures.

“Governor Healey and the Massachusetts Legislature have erased the final protections for unborn children who can feel pain and who could survive outside the womb,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “At the very stage when premature babies are receiving lifesaving care in neonatal intensive care units, Massachusetts will permit abortionists to end the lives of children of the same age—and even older. That is not compassion, and it is not health care.”

Supporters claim the law protects the doctor-patient relationship, but it places the decision entirely in the hands of the abortion provider while denying any legal protection to the unborn child.

“Legalizing elective abortion up to birth on healthy mothers and healthy, pain-capable unborn children is not about protecting the doctor-patient relationship,” said Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, National Right to Life’s state affiliate. “It is about abortionists normalizing the deaths of fully developed infants and pressuring vulnerable women to permit their unborn children to die in heinous acts of violence. These abortions represent among the most severe human rights abuses permitted in only a few places around the world, including China and North Korea.”

The Massachusetts House passed H.5595 on July 22 by a vote of 119–33. The Senate approved the measure on July 31 and sent it to Governor Healey.

“This law exposes the dishonesty behind the claim that no one supports abortion until birth,” Tobias continued. “When lawmakers remove every objective limitation and authorize an abortion provider to decide whether an abortion may be performed at any point in pregnancy, abortion until birth is precisely what the law allows.”

National Right to Life and Massachusetts Citizens for Life remain committed to protecting mothers and their unborn children from an abortion industry that profits when vulnerable women believe they have no better choice.

Founded in 1968, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the federation of affiliates in each of the 50 states, is the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots pro-life organization. National Right to Life works through legislation and education to protect innocent human life from abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia.